Bernie Sanders news roundup July 16, 2015 on Blog#42

The Biggest Difference Between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders? Their Donors

Hillary Clinton has raised more money than any of the 19 other candidates running for president in the Democratic and Republican primaries. According to new filings with the Federal Elections Commission, the Clinton campaign raised more than $47 million during the last quarter, at an average clip of more than $500,000 every 24 hours.

Running a distant second is fellow Democratic contender Sen. Bernie Sanders. The independent from Vermont pulled down $15.2 million in about two months, according to FEC filings. Despite the considerable gap, Sanders’ haul is impressive: The former mayor of Burlington has served in the House and Senate for nearly 25 years, but he has never run for national office or held a cabinet-level position in a presidential administration. For most Americans, “Bernie” is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Over the past month, however, Sanders has emerged as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination and an energizing force on the campaign trail. He regularly presides over massive rallies and events, drawing thousands of potential voters and, equally important at this stage, future donors.

The breakdown: This hard work has paid off in the form of a grassroots explosion, with more than 80% of Sanders’ campaign contributions coming in chunks of $200 or less. Clinton presents an almost mirror image; less than 20% of her much larger total came from small donors.

elf-described member of the 1 percent shocked the Reddit community on Wednesday with an explanation of why he was voting for the presidential candidate who has made higher taxes for the wealthy a tenet of his campaign.

In a wildly popular Reddit post, a user named thunderd11 announced: “I’m a member of the 1% and I’m voting for Bernie Sanders.”

The user who described himself as a “white male in my 30s” said that he grew up “fairly poor,” and then started a successful consulting firm after nearly a decade in the military, earning him “membership in the 1% by pretty much any definition of the phrase.”

He argued that Sanders’ plan to return to the 90 percent top income tax rates of the early 1950s was the right way to address income inequality.

“After all the write offs, business expenses, mortgage interest deductions etc… My Taxable Income is less than half of my Gross Income,” the 1 percenter noted. “Add in my capital gains earnings at their super low tax rate even though my gross income is well over the top tax bracket my effective tax rate is usually around 17-18% every year and could actually be quite a bit lower if I put actual effort into (legal) tax avoidance strategies.”

WASHINGTON — The quotations he posts, rarely pithy, are often sayings he thinks up in the shower. The photographs he puts up sometimes show him frowning, while others show him gazing oddly into the horizon. And he does not seem to care about the importance of videos.

But somehow, Bernie Sanders, the 73-year-old senator from Vermont, has emerged as a king of social media early in the 2016 presidential campaign, amid a field of tech-savvy contenders.

His Facebook posts attract tens of thousands of likes and shares, and threads about him often break through to the home page of Reddit, where the cluster of topics rarely focuses on presidential election politics.

“I’m a grumpy old guy,” Mr. Sanders joked when explaining his approach to posting online. “I know that people talk about their cats and ‘I’m walking to the grocery store and getting a can of chicken soup’ and ‘this is so exciting.’ By and large, we have not done that.”

Mr. Sanders’s prominence online is all the more improbable given that he does not do many things the way social media experts say they should be done.